While Overwatch will have plenty of overarching story bringing the characters and world together, it won't have a singleplayer campaign.

The "big reveal" of Blizzcon this year was undoubtedly Overwatch, a multiplayer shooter which is the company's first new IP in nearly two decades. Blizzard were pretty good with details, providing us plenty of images and info on the game's classes, maps, and game modes, but of course, we still had questions. Kotaku recently sat down with Blizzard to have some of these questions answered. We now know that while the game will have plenty of overarching story bringing the characters and world together, it will unfortunately lack a singleplayer campaign.

"I don't think we would ever do a singleplayer campaign, because the way these characters work... they're cool when you combine them together," explained game director Jeff Kaplan. "Some don't play well alone, either. Unless we built a campaign around supporting somebody else, a support character like Mercy probably wouldn't do well."

He explained that the game's story will instead unfurl between the in-game chatter of the characters, as well as how they react to maps and other in-game elements. He also added, "I can't tell you where it's going, but I can tell you we have a great cinematics department and they're fired up to have this new universe at their disposal."

Kotaku also asked some questions about the nature of the game, such as whether or not it will be free-to-play, and if it will be getting new playable characters added in the future. Kaplan remained pretty tight-lipped on the game's pay structure, but did say that adding new characters is something they want to do. "We kind of see this as an infinitely expandable universe. Now I doubt it'll have, like, 800 heroes. But what we're excited about is that there's no shortage of ideas or space."

Furthermore, while Kaplan had nothing to announce at this time regarding the game's modability, he stressed that "I hope fans trust that we've embraced modding," citing the fully-moddable nature of previous titles such as WarCraft III and StarCraft II.

Lastly, hats? "I don't think you'll see Team Fortress 2 hats," replied Kaplan. "That's been the big question, but I don't think we're gonna do hats. I don't know how we'd put a hat on the Reaper. Put a hat on the hood?"

Thank god for no hats. I'm totally with Yahtzee on this one. The hats from TF2 just totally fucked up the aesthetic of the game. I like the character designs as they are and havin ridiculous shit like random fez's and towers of hats would totally ruin it for me.

Not worried about the lack of single player either, though I do hope there is somethin akin to the co-op mode that was added into TF2.

No Hats? Then no buy. Seriously, many of the hats in TF2 are awesome (Such as the Beep Man), and over half of them show how skilled the TF2 Community is (As they are submitted by the Community). Overwatch, which already looks a lot more complicated then TF2, should at least have fun things to get.

A strange announcement that didn't really need announcing. I mean, it immediately looks like TF2, which doesn't have one. I don't even know how you would put SP in to a game like this. I mean, I love SP way more than MP, but it would be deluded to think that this game could even work with SP.

I have to admit finding the desire for a single player mode to be rather strange. It's clearly designed as a multi player title and any single player would almost definitely just be a tacked on afterthought.

Isn't that the sort of thing that gets blasted to high heaven when it's done in reverse (aka a tacked on afterthought of multiplayer in a clearly single player experience)?

Everything I've learned about this game screams multiplayer. I guess a sort-of campaign a la Quake 3 could have been made, but no one actually played Q3 for the campaign. If they did, they were confused and a little bit sad. Much like Q3, or the more apt comparison, TF2, this is clearly a multiplayer game and tacking on a singleplayer campaign won't do it any favours.

I'm just glad they are going to support the game's lore with some supplementary trailers, which is cool.

Also, I'm hoping that instead of hats they are going to implement skins. I really enjoy them and they allow for some wild creativity from the designers.

The main question right now is what kind of model they are going to use. I have hopes that it is not going to be LoL's or Smite's model because they won't make sense due to two reasons.1)Forcing new players to play limited heroes would completely wreck the gameplay. Can you imagine a match in TF where all players are locked in Pyro or Heavy's role?2)There are simply not enough heroes to implement this kind of feature or any sort of weekly rotations.

Same here, this whole always online bullcrap can stick it where the sun don't shine there's no excuse. All because they want total control over your game so they can kill it when their sick of supporting it.

erttheking:Is this really a surprise to anyone? Did anyone watch the trailers and gameplay and think anything other than "Multiplayer only"?

I hoped, personally, until I got to the gameplay videos. Like I said elsewhere, it seems like a waste, coming up with a bunch of unique characters and a well-designed world and lore and stuff, only to blow them on a "just run around and shoot people Team Fortress-style" game rather than actually doing anything with them. So yeah, not for me.

I find it weird people come into articles about multiplayer only games and act like not having singleplayer is the worst thing ever. If a game is designed strictly around the idea of multiplayer, then not having singleplayer is no huge loss. If you don't like playing games with other people, then don't buy the game. It's that simple.

I was kinda already expecting it to have a story outside of the actual game similar to how TF2 does it with comics and short animated clips. Blizzard already does out of game stuff like that with World of Warcraft so it's not like they're any stranger to it.

I'm honestly okay with this. Nothing about the trailers suggested there was much meat there story-wise. Not every game suits a singleplayer mode just as not every game suits having multiplayer. As long as they don't charge £40 for it (which they won't, let's be honest here), I don't see anything wrong.

If they wanted to make a TF2-esk game fine, but did Titanfall teach us nothing? Trying to tell a detailed story in a MP only game will only end in tears. Those two things just don't mesh guys, come on now...

erttheking:Is this really a surprise to anyone? Did anyone watch the trailers and gameplay and think anything other than "Multiplayer only"?

Yeah I don't get it either. Or why that might be a bad thing. It was pretty obviously focused just on a multiplayer experience and that's fine with me.

I did, because I remember Unreal Tournament 3 was all about the multiplayer, but still had a weak single-player mode to build upon the world and characters. TF2 made videos and comics to flesh out their characters as bit, but it's not the same as playing through a storyline with cut scenes and dialogue.

And it's a bad thing because online gamers are often whiny teenagers or raging man-children that scream into their mics when they lose. I'd much prefer bots; bots play just as bad and never speak.

*sigh* I'll say it again: This could have been Blizzard's 'Borderlands', but disappoints (me) on so many levels. As if we don't have enough arena shooters.

Well, this shows me how much of an old gamer I've become. I'm just not in the focus group anymore. And not playing Multiplayer at all, selecting games based on atmosphere and story, doesn't help either. A shame, as I like the art of 'Overwatch'.